To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Saturday, February 27, 2016

George Quasha: from Alternate Lingualities (preverbs), with a note on “Self-Organized Criticality”

George Quasha's 'axial art,' from the artist's website

(Six from a series of
thirty-four poems)

for
Lissa Wolsak

1 taller tales still to untell

My life or this dream may
have matured to the point where I can say I
eat earth.Suddenly I see myself dancing alone never alone in a mirror reflectively
still.
I woke in a sweat because I remembered I have no name.

Mind awakens by field,
fireflies.
Eating earth is not eating dirt, the latter requiring more complex evolution.
We’re only foreplaying in the sensible.

Dragon eyes are her
apertures and my port of entry.
No customs pertain.
Finding fire in the cold of her body I lit up.

Anima animates my animal
awake to her human.
Reading certain texts you touch a mind you could never find.
I can say what is true so long as I do not believe it.

I’m still tracking the
beings I know without knowing— especially not who.
The faith of the bowman is beyond belief.
The tall slender high-heeled tale goes like this dakini sounding of unknown
origin.

The target sucks in the
arrow.
Effortless expression has got my number.
Vida: Eat pussy with fire until turning
up swirl rouses the dragon.

No need to believe
that—there’s no her and no me where she has us going.

2 spread

I’m revising my sense of
beauty as we speak.
I write the line as if running out of ink.
It means the book means in flashes of the field, surrounded and self-erasing.

In the end nothing to rely
on but a hunch.
The ego doesn’t die, it just fragments, pales, and multiplies.

It’s got craft if
attachment releases without rejection of sensual texture.
You see it in deep cloud activity with your own eyes, not entirely yours.
My life or this dream may have matured to the point where I can say I drink dragons.

Running out of ink running
out of my cave, all for love of cageless eggs and spread.
Order is performative.
It hits the spot.

The cloud is making
offerings on my behalf which helps me across the bridge.
I can only say this due to the proto-allegorical tendencies of my life in
footnotes.
Distraction is not knowing the speaking is going on without your apparent
consent.

Duly noted and on foot as
reflected by the page.
I get lost enough to let it show.
Notably: The greatest number of egos
congregate where one has been annihilated.

This line of thinking
accounts for my no count identity.
I grow less sure of one as a day
ages.

20 gender dynamic

Poetry is language willing to get excited not
knowing what it is.
In the divine moment the mirror looks the other way.

Only the things never thought can reach us at this
distance.
Fixtures of body are depressions of form.
Mirror art is less and less reliable, only where spooked it reflects further.

It’s tomorrow all around the poem where I hides from aggression.
There’s discursive hope in confusing pronouns.

You answer my burning question and I cool down
inside.
She answers, I heat, the attitude producing the question ignites.
Mystical union gives off interpronominal pulsation.

22 story is a killer

Chi riding wind scatters till meeting water retains.I write
what I long to read that longs to be read and it lengthens, then cut.

No blow
benign unless driven by winds of unaccountable awareness.I take
back all strikes against others and myself but note not all rush back home.The same for the opposite but there is no opposite. It’s narration, how we
get here.

The sky clouds, the line crowds: step by stop, word
by world, repeat not, no spell.Refuge narrates unless the breath draws
up unaccountable awareness.

The book is watching. The page flicks askance.
Rhetorical fractals. Deadly story.
Literary mind is never ready for its ditch.
Fencing distracts from vulnerability.

In an instant I am my poem.
What was I thinking before the train blew through… but the thought escapes me.
All the poems ever read are your own forever but who’s counting…

Your life work talking about itself talking about
itself tracks itself when you let it.
It’s a diary of everything that never happened before its moment.
Instantly speaking its dialect of not ever before loses me but now I’m found,
telling.

Follow the appetites.
A surface moving aright feels the surgent underpulse of verb acting up in flow.

Lingual eros tells the touch that takes itself back
at the threshold.

23 body at large

The frog pond knows you’re listening.
The poem gets excited being read.
No one can prove any of this which qualifies it to be the subject of poetry.

Music spirals in the head, in the cells, in the
room.
This is what we mean by touching.
You get what you can handle.

Listening to the same sound equals breathing the
same air.
Getting so close you wonder how can anything contaminate the unlimited.
Listeners touch from inside to inside direct.

Self-celebratory mind is never ready for potholes.
When failure to find order times out the session reading mind crashes.
If only it had held on longer it could have bottomed out and burned with the
poem.

Language has better things to do than say what I
mean.
Picking on pronouns may be a cheap trick vitalized by an unfolding nature of
things.
We hold their feet to the fire and suffer the burn.

Successful communication is blood from a
turnip-shaped stone.
Logics are that evolve on a curve. Consistency is not a core virtue.

Never enough language for everything trying to be said true to its
singularity.The past
leaps up out of the present waving its signifying arms, futuristic.
I play a shell game with myself and always get it wrong.

Pick the
shell phrase that conceals the Stone.Wrong
forever the thinking to find.
Purport and import dance through our discourse.

No god who lets you name him/her/them can be
trusted.
I mirror her mirror before it sees me.
The third gender is the one engendering free.

They speak me from behind myself for whose sake is
yet to come.

Preverbs
and the Poetics of Self-Organized Criticality

A few
months ago I had very interesting conversations with James Sherry in which we
discussed the issues in his important piece on ecological thinking and poetry,
“Against One Model,” where he raises what I consider to be a core issue today:
“…can poetry enhance our correspondence with the non-human components of the
biosphere, giving us a chance to adapt our culture to new conditions?” He
stands against the idea of a “single model of human interaction with the
biosphere,” and his approach resonates with the poetic principle I call axial in its avoidance of model-based
solutions whenever possible, and for me that includes any binding
single-concept approaches to poetic theory and practice. Axiality is a
principle conceived as necessary free space for continuously rethinking
anything at all—even wheel-reinvention. The appeal of applying external modes
of thinking to poetics—like ecology, quantum physics, ethology,
linguistics—functions both as source of alternative approaches to poetic
principle and as inquiry into how poetics can help us rethink our relation to
the world. Axiality encourages the view that these seemingly contrary
orientations are not either/or—the poem or the world—but instead that poetry
comprises a zone of oscillatory thinking—poem as working matrix of revisioning
all manner of questions facing us. Accordingly I want to mention here my
interest in considering a poetics of
self-organized criticality regarding how a poetic process might become intelligent in its own right, and for me
how ordering becomes articulate in relation to sustained trust in the
self-organizing process.

In a
recent dialogue with Thomas Fink about the four published books of preverbs I wrote that 17 years ago
preverbs started out as an accumulation of individually generated lines with no
concept of discrete parts beyond collected bunches of non-linear lines with
titles (a “poem” was over a hundred lines single-spaced and no breaks). That
was true for about the first 5,000 lines. It evolved, like everything in
preverbs, by something like self-organized
criticality (SOC). That rather
specialized physics term was introduced to me a few years ago by the Scottish
nano-physicist James Gimzewski (UCLA), working with the artist Victoria Vesna,
and it helped me understand how preverbs had evolved from the level of single
line to poem to book. Frankly there were important gaps in my retrospective
understanding of the uncertainty process which became somewhat clearer when I
thought about it using the concept of SOC. Defined technically as “a property of (classes of) dynamical systems that
have a critical point as an
attractor,” it describes an approach to complexity in which a system with
many units interacting locally has an unpredictable critical threshold for
change globally. Studying the part will not predict the behavior of the whole.
Examples include the weather, earthquakes, climate change, the global economy,
and, recently, brain activity—now poetry. The base is the old but continuously
refined idea of self-organization,
describing overall order emerging out of local interactions, the smaller
components of an initially disordered system, or chaos.

From the
beginning preverbs have come mostly preformed and performative in the ear-mind.
I write them in a notebook I carry with me everywhere, ever ready to write
because I have about 30 underway I regard
as dowsing—the pen as doodlebug or
divining rod, so to speak, an indicative conduit. You could call it syntax witching. I gravitate toward this
sort of metaphor of the unexplainable because the process is self-generating,
not contrived or rationally focused or adapted for aesthetic effect. It’s a
nodal event that comes with a body-sense aura, which over time one gets better
at distinguishing from mental babble. A sharp incursion of the unknown
attractor.

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]